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要旨

The history of the European Community has not confirmed the hopes, of «Europeanist» politicians and «neo-functional» theorists alike, for dynamic processes of deepening and widening functional integration, culminating in an European federal state. But for all its disappointments and frustrations, the European enterprise has proven much more resilient than the «realist» school of International Relations and the political and scholarly promotors of an Europe des patries would have predicted. It is tempting to ascribe the paradox of European integration-frustration without disintegration and resilience without progress to historical accidents or to the interventions of certain powerful individuals. Instead, this paper argues that the European malaise may be explained as the consequence of a characteristic pattern of policy choices under certain institutional conditions. This pattern, the «joint-decision trap», has been first identified in the institutional setting of federal-Länder relations in West Germany. It is shown that similar institutional conditions are producing similar decision patterns in the European Community.